on this frail basis, had the mortification of observing that on the third
evening he had resumed his bachelor habits.

This was a great blow to her, and her sadness became greater than it had
been up to that time; so much so in fact, that solitude was almost
unbearable. She had hardly been long enough in Paris to form intimacies.
Madame Jaubert came to her friend as often as she could; but in the
intervals the Countess adopted the habit of retaining Vautrot, or even of
sending for him. Camors himself, three fourths of the time, would bring
him in before going out in the evening.

"I bring you Vautrot, my dear," he would say, "and Shakespeare. You can
read him together."

Vautrot read well; and though his heavy declamatory style frequently
annoyed the Countess, she thus managed to kill many a long evening, while
waiting the expected visit of Madame de Tecle. But Vautrot, whenever he
looked at her, wore such a sympathetic air and seemed so mortified when
she did not invite him to stay, that, even when wearied of him, she
frequently did so.

About the end of the month of April, M. Vautrot was alone with the
Countess de Camors about ten o'clock in the evening. They were reading
Goethe's Faust, which she had never before heard. This reading seemed to
interest the young woman more than usual, and with her eyes fixed on the
reader, she listened to it with rapt attention. She was not alone
fascinated by the work, but--as is frequently the case-she traced her own
thoughts and her own history in the fiction of the poet.

We all know with what strange clairvoyance a mind possessed with a fixed